Autonomy and Compliance: How Qualitative Sociologists Respond to Institutional Ethical Oversight Judith Taylor & Matthew Patterson Published online: 23 February 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Prevailing sociological understandings of institutional ethical review tend to homogenize faculty responses to them, and are predominantly speculative. In this research, we conduct interviews with sociologists from 21 Ph.D.-granting departments across Canada, finding three predominant “ethics orientations” among them, with associated cognitive maps and strategic actions. In our analyses, we use these orientations to complicate homogeneous appraisals of social researchers’ responses to new bureaucratic requirements, enriching our understanding of how such requirements affect the ways sociologists think about their occupation, approach their research, and mentor successive generations. These ethics orientations suggest the field of sociology is comprised of distinct political cohorts with diverging understandings of ethical review, and by extension, power and intellectual work. For some, ethical review signals a more consultative and therefore better approach to knowledge production, while for others it marks the end of an era of unfettered (and superior) intellectual pursuit in sociology. Keywords Ethical review . Sociology . Qualitative research . Bureaucracy . Strategy Introduction The correlation between occupational autonomy and self-reported satisfaction is one of the most significant findings in the sociology of work (Hodson 2004). Academia has long been thought of as an ideal field for those seeking autonomy in their daily work lives, though this freedom has been steadily eroding over time (Krause 1996). Anthropologists explain this erosion as partially resulting from a shift to an “audit culture” in academia, in which intellectual freedom is replaced by neoliberal bureaucratic accountability (Strathern 2000). Social scientists have been attentive to the rise of institutional ethical oversight specifically, Qual Sociol (2010) 33:161–183 DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9148-y J. Taylor (*) : M. Patterson Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 2J4, Canada e-mail: jtaylor@chass.utoronto.ca M. Patterson e-mail: matt.patterson@utoronto.ca